Pierre Charles L'Enfant

Pierre Charles L'Enfant (2 August 1754-14 June 1825) was a French-American military engineer who designed the basic plan for the American national capital of Washington DC in 1791. Despite his designing of the cities of Washington DC and Patterson, he died in poverty in 1825.

Biography
Pierre Charles L'Enfant was born in Paris, France in 1754, the son of a painter in the service of King Louis XV of France. He studied at the Louvre and the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and he later enlisted in the French Royal Army during the American Revolutionary War; he served under the Marquis de Lafayette as a military engineer in the Continental Army. L'Enfant made a number of pencil portraits of American generals and also made paintings of Continental military encampments. L'Enfant was wounded at Savannah in 1779 and captured at Charleston in 1780, but he was exchanged a few months later and served on George Washington's staff for the remainder of the war, becoming a Major in 1783. Following the war, he became a civil engineer in New York City, and he redesigned Federal Hall in New York and designed furniture and houses for the wealthy. He became a Freemason in 1789, and, in 1791, he was commissioned to design the layout of the new American national capital, which was to become Washington DC. L'Enfant's plan was mostly approved, but Washington dismissed him after Andrew Ellicott's plan was approved instead. L'Enfant went on to plan the city of Paterson in New Jersey, but he was discharged after a year; it would later adopt his plans in 1846. He served as a professor of engineering at West Point from 1813 to 1817, but he died in poverty in Prince George's County, Maryland in 1825 at the age of 70.